The Philistine generals did not share Achish's credulity. They refused to believe that David was earnest in his defection—surely he would turn on his Philistine allies in order to put himself back into the good graces of King Saul. “He shall not fight side by side with us, or he may turn traitor in the battle,” they protested. “What better way to buy his master's favour than at the price of our lives?” (1 Sam. 29:4–5) (NEB)
Above all, the Philistines still feared the military prowess and sheer ruthlessness of the young mercenary.
“Is this not David,” the lords of Philistia asked the king of Gath, “of whom they sang one to another in dances, saying:
Saul hath slain his thousands,
And David his ten thousands?
(1 Sam. 29:5)
So Achish, dutifully but regretfully, summoned the man he regarded as his faithful vassal to his war tent and ordered him back to his fiefdom in Ziklag.
“As Yahweh lives, you have been upright—I have not found evil in you since the day of your coming,” he said to David, oddly invoking the God of Israel rather than one of the gods and goddesses of the Philistine pantheon. “Nevertheless, the Philistine lords favor you not.” (1 Sam. 29:6)20
Remarkably, David did not take advantage of Achish's order, which offered him an opportunity to avoid open warfare against his own countrymen. Rather, as the Bible plainly reveals, David urgently reasserted his loyalty to the Philistine cause. Any enemy of the king of Gath, David insisted, was his enemy, too.
“But what have I done,” David pleaded, “that I may not go and fight against the enemies of my lord the king?” (1 Sam. 29:8)
“I know you are as good in my sight as an angel of God,” Achish said, again invoking the Israelite deity. “But the Philistine commanders have said: ‘He shall not go up with us to the battle.’ So rise up early in the morning, and as soon as you have enough light, depart.” (1 Sam. 29:10)21
David obeyed the order, rising early with his men and leading them back into Gath as the Philistine army formed up into ranks and columns and marched toward Jezreel, where Saul and Jonathan had positioned the army of Israel in battle array. When the Philistines and the Israelites finally crossed swords, David and his men had already retreated to safety deep in enemy territory.
DAVID AND THE MYSTERY OF THE HABIRU
An intriguing clue to David's origin and character may be found in the question that the lords of Philistia put to King Achish on the eve of battle: “What are these Hebrews doing here?” (1 Sam. 29:3) The Bible generally refers to the twelve tribes who descended from the patriarch Jacob as “Israelites” or, more precisely, the Children of Israel (b'nai Yisrael).22 But the Philistines use a very different term for the same people—“Hebrews” (ivrim), a word that may have been used to identify David and his men as renegades.
Nowadays, of course, “Hebrew” is the word used to described the language of the Bible and, in its updated form, of the modern state of Israel. But the Bible uses the term to identify a people, not a language, and only in very specific circumstances. “Hebrews” is used for the Israelites only in biblical passages where non-Israelites such as the Philistines or the Egyptians are speaking about the Israelites, or where the Israelites are distinguishing themselves from non-Israelites. The distinction between “Hebrews” and “Israelites,” however, remained a mystery until the late nineteenth century, when archaeologists began to uncover references to a people called the Habiru in extra-biblical texts of the ancient Near East.
The Habiru, for example, are mentioned in a cache of diplomatic correspondence dating back to the fifteenth century B.C.E. that was unearthed at a site in Egypt known as Tell el-Amarna. The clay tablets were covered with writing in the cuneiform alphabet of the Akkadian language that was used in international diplomacy and commerce in the ancient Near East, and they included intelligence reports from the chieftains of Canaan about newly arrived marauders called Habiru (or “Apiru,” as the term is sometimes rendered in English) who were waging a war of conquest throughout Canaan.
“The Apiru plunder all the lands of the king,” complains the Canaanite chieftain of Jerusalem in one of the Amarna letters, pleading with the Pharaoh for protection against the plunderers. “If there are archers here in this year, the lands of the king, my lord, will remain intact; but if there are no archers here, the lands of the king, my lord, will be lost!”23
To the glee of early Bible scholars, who saw the Habiru and the Hebrews as one and the same people, the Amarna letters seem to prove, once and for all and with solid documentary evidence, that the Bible is a work of history rather than a sacred myth. But the initial enthusiasm was tempered when it was discovered that the word habiru is found in writings from other sources, too, including the ancient Mesopotamian archives found at Mari, a site on the Euphrates River in modern Syria. As used by these far-flung archivists and chroniclers of the ancient world, habiru apparently referred to any people who lived outside a settled community rather than to a specific tribe or nation.
Today, habiru is probably best understood as a term for “fugitives” or “refugees” who might show up as bandits or brigands in one place, soldiers of fortune in another, or what we today would call illegal aliens almost anywhere in the ancient Near East during the second millennium B.C.E. The most desperate among them might have sold themselves into slavery for the simple expedient of a place to sleep and a daily meal, but most of the habiru, like the ones mentioned so tantalizingly in the Amarna letters, were marauders who descended upon towns and farms that offered the prospect of easy plunder.24 Thus, the word habiru certainly applies to David and his little army of malcontents, and that may be what the lords of Philistia meant when they used the word recorded in the Bible as “Hebrews.”25
An oblique but intriguing glimpse into the ways of the habiru—and the real life of David—is afforded by a much more recent phenomenon, the so-called klephts of nineteenth-century Greece. The klephts, according to historian Paul Johnson, were “bands of debtors, jailbirds, fugitives, misfits, victims and adventurers who could not flourish in society but took to the hills to live by violence.” They tended to leave shepherds unmolested, since many of them had been shepherds themselves, but they “robbed unguarded travelers [and] sometimes carried out mass attacks on villages.” The bands were exclusively male, and members may have engaged in homosexuality among themselves. A “successful bandit,” who had “built up a band that was strong in reputation, men and sheep,” might be able to put himself in service to the governing authority as a kapitanos, an officer in charge of a paramilitary unit, thus passing “the frontier from illegality to legality.”26
On every point, the klephts bear a striking resemblance to the Habiru of the ancient world and to David and his men during their fugitive years. David started out as a shepherd, but he literally “took to the hills” when he forfeited the favor of King Saul. He prided himself on his generosity toward the shepherds who served the rich Nabal, but he did not hesitate to shake down the rich man himself. He routinely led his men in “mass attacks on villages,” and then he relied on his fearsome reputation to put himself in service to the king of Gath. His declaration of love for Jonathan suggests that he may have shared the tastes of the klephts in matters of the heart. “Local folk songs often told the tale of how a bandit became a famous and rich kapitanos,” Johnson writes of the klephts27—and the same might be said of the Bible and its heroic account of David's ascent from bandit to king.
The Bible presents David as a lordly figure who moved in the loftiest circles of power and privilege in ancient Israel, the son of a landowner from Bethlehem and the son-in-law of King Saul. Later, he will marry into other royal families, and the biblical genealogists will contrive a long and honorable family tree for him. And yet the Bible also depicts David as a fugitive, an outcast, a mercenary. So we may wonder if David was, in fact, an outsider who bullied and insinuated his way to power and then inspired his royal biographers to rewrite history in order to cast him in a h
eroic and romantic light. Perhaps the notion of David as a habiru is closer to the truth—and, if so, it helps to explain the bloodthirsty exploits of his fugitive years and the ruthlessness that figures so crucially in his character.
DAVID'S PLUNDER
Classic Bible commentary holds that David was only bluffing when he offered to go to war against Saul, and insists that he meant all along to act loyally to the nation of Israel. The troubling question of what David would have done if his Philistine masters had called his bluff is left unanswered. But now, as if to sweeten the sour taste that the whole episode leaves in the reader's mouth, the biblical author hastens to credit David with an act of courage that counterbalances his apparent treachery.
Three days after leaving the Philistine army, David and his men finally reached Ziklag, but they found only empty, smoking ruins. In David's absence, the dreaded Amalekites had raided the place, setting the town afire and carrying off the women and children. Even the wives of David, Abigail and Ahinoam, were gone.
Then David and the people that were with him lifted up their voice and wept, until they had no more power to weep. The soul of all the people was grieved, every man for his sons and for his daughters, but David strengthened himself in the Lord his God.
(1 Sam. 30:4)28
But even as David mourned his missing wives, his men began to blame him for the folly of leaving Ziklag undefended. “David was in a desperate position,” the Bible concedes, “because the people, embittered by the loss of their sons and daughters, threatened to stone him.” (1 Sam. 30:6) (NEB) Here we are reminded that David, no matter how charismatic the Bible makes him out to be, was forced to contend with naysayers like any other leader. The people of Judah had been willing to betray him to Saul, and now his own men were ready to rise up and put him to death.
As if to divert the attention of the mutinous army, David announced that he would seek an oracle from Yahweh on what to do next. So he called for Abiathar, the only priest to escape the slaughter at Nob, and bade him to bring along the ephod he had managed to snatch from the shrine of Yahweh. David had used the same ploy once before when his men declared themselves too frightened to carry out a raid on the Philistines at Keilah, and it worked again to silence the mutineers at Ziklag.
The casting of lots, as we have already seen, yielded only simple answers to the questions posed to God—“Yes,” “No,” and sometimes “No comment”—but here the biblical author asks us to imagine the encounter as an intimate conversation between Yahweh and David.
“Shall I pursue?” David inquires. “Shall I overtake them?”
“Pursue” is Yahweh's simple reply by means of lot casting, but then the biblical author suggests that God elaborated upon his answer: “For thou shalt surely overtake them, and shalt without fail recover all.” (1 Sam. 30:8)
Thus reassured of victory by the ultimate authority, David's men forgot all about stoning their commander. Instead they lined up behind David as he set off in search of the Amalekite raiding party. Finding the enemy in the trackless wilderness, however, was not so easy. After all, the Amalekites were camel-mounted nomads moving through familiar terrain, and they enjoyed a head start of several days. David needed some intelligence on the whereabouts of the raiding party, and his source turned out to be a young Egyptian slave whom the Amalekites had abandoned in the desert when he fell ill.
To restore his strength and loosen his tongue, the Egyptian was given water and food—“a cake of figs and two clusters of raisins,” the Bible reports with convincing detail—and then David himself began to question him. (1 Sam. 30:12) After the fearful young man extracted David's promise to “neither kill me nor turn me over to my master,” he agreed to lead David and his men to the Amalekite camp. (1 Sam. 30:15)29 As they approached, David saw that the raiders were raucously celebrating their victories, “eating and drinking and feasting because of all the great spoil that they had taken out of the land of the Philistines and out of the land of Judah.” (1 Sam. 30:16)
At twilight David and his men charged the camp, and the fighting continued without pause “unto the evening of the next day.” Four hundred of the Amalekites were able to mount their camels and escape, but the rest of the raiders were slain without mercy. As the oracle of Yahweh had promised, all of the captives— David's two wives and the rest of the women and children—were recovered alive and unharmed, and the flocks and herds of the Amalekites were taken as spoils of war.
“This is David's plunder!” cried the men who had been ready to stone him only a few days before, thus crediting their commander with the ultimate destruction of the Amalekite raiders. (1 Sam. 30:20) (AB)
SPOILS OF WAR
Any chance to spill the blood of an Amalekite, the ancient and emblematic enemy of the Israelites, made for good public relations. “Thou shalt blot out the remembrance of Amalek from under heaven,” Moses had declared in the name of God. “Thou shalt not forget.”(Deut. 25:19) And the fresh supply of plunder gave David an opportunity to make generous gifts to the opinion makers of Judah and the people whose lands he had once raided, thus rehabilitating himself in the eyes of his countrymen. Accordingly, from this moment forward, the Bible subtly revises its depiction of David: he is presented more as a savvy politician seeking to build a constituency than as a renegade guerrilla captain.
First, against the protests of the frontline soldiers, David insisted on sharing the spoils of war with some two hundred men who served in the rear guard during the attack on the Amalekites. “The share of him that goes down to the battle, so shall be the share of him that tarried by the baggage—they shall share and share alike,” David decreed. “And it was so from that day forward,” the biblical author pauses to note, “that he made it a statute and an ordinance for Israel unto this day.” (1 Sam. 30:24–25)30
Next, David allotted a portion of the plunder as gift-offerings to “the elders of Judah” and his other “friends” in towns and cities in the land of Judah: “To them that were in Beth-el, and to them that were in Ramoth,” begins the long list preserved in the biblical text, “and to all the places over which David himself and his men had ranged.” (1 Sam. 30:27, 31) Even a few non-Israelite tribes who lived within the tribal homeland of Judah were favored with gifts—the Kenites, for example, and the Jerahmeelites. Significantly, the places that David favored with gifts were located within the vicinity of Hebron, a place regarded as sacred in the legend and lore of ancient Israel and a seat of political authority in the tribal homeland of Judah.31
“Behold, a present for you,” went the message from David that accompanied each gift, “of the spoil of the enemies of the Lord.” (1 Sam. 30:26–31)
At this moment, the soldier of fortune and bandit-king is eclipsed by the politician and the statesman. Clearly, the biblical author is preparing his readers for David's elevation from fugitive to monarch, but we are also able to mark a change in David himself: he is older and wiser, battle-hardened but somehow mellowed by his exploits in war. His youthful swagger has been replaced by a more regal bearing, and his taste for rough justice has been softened by more generous impulses. David's long exile from the land of Israel is now coming to an end, and when he next sets foot in Hebron, he will be ready to claim the crown of kingship.
THE KING IS DEAD
The crown that David sought still rested on the head of King Saul, but not for much longer. The king's army, outnumbered and outfought by the Philistines, spilled down the slopes of Mount Gilboa in open rout, and Saul found himself in great peril. “And the Philistines followed hard upon Saul and upon his sons,” the Bible reports (1 Sam. 31:2), a reminder that ancient kings customarily went to war with their armies, and they were the first targets of the enemy forces that sought to decapitate an army by killing its commander in chief. (1 Sam. 31:2)
Jonathan was the first to fall into the hands of the Philistines, and then two more sons of Saul were taken—all three of them were slain where they stood. Now Saul found himself cut off by a platoon of Philistine arch
ers, an arrow in his belly. (1 Sam. 31:3)32 At that desperate moment, the Bible suggests, the king of Israel imagined himself riddled with arrows, tortured to death on the battlefield, his body handled like carrion and put on display for the pleasure of the jeering Philistines—and the prospect of an ignoble death was more painful to Saul than death itself.
“Draw your sword, and run me through,” Saul ordered his armor-bearer, “so that these uncircumcised brutes may not come and taunt me and make sport of me.” (1 Sam. 31:4) (NEB) But the armor-bearer was “sore afraid” to obey and so he refused to draw his sword, choosing to defy the king's last command rather than stain his own hands with the king's blood. (1 Sam. 31:4)
“Therefore Saul took his sword, and fell upon it,” the Bible reports. “And when his armor-bearer saw that Saul was dead, he likewise fell upon his sword and died with him.” (1 Sam. 31:4–5)
Thus was Samuel's prophecy fulfilled at long last, and Saul's death ended the torment that he had suffered since the day that God withdrew his blessing and abandoned him to his fate. “So Saul died, and his three sons, and his armor-bearer, and all his men, that same day together.” (1 Sam. 31:6) But the peace that now soothed old Saul was denied to the people of Israel. When word of the carnage began to spread, the towns in the vicinity of Mount Gilboa emptied as the Israelites fled in panic. “And the Philistines came,” the Bible says of the deserted houses of Israel, “and dwelt in them.” (1 Sam. 31:7)
Saul's final paranoid vision of his own death came to pass. The next day, as the Philistine soldiers picked their way among the dead on the battlefield, pausing here and there to strip a corpse of any valuables they might find—yet another realistic detail of warfare in the ancient world—they came upon the body of King Saul.
King David: The Real Life of the Man Who Ruled Israel (Ballantine Reader's Circle) Page 13